the etuktuk project

“Asian Voices” is a monthly radio magazine programme produced by the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) from Singapore. It brings you news, views and interviews on Asian media and communication issues from an Asian perspective. In this first issue of “Asian Voices” Kalinga Seneviratne joins the ‘etuktuk’ team at Kothmale Community Radio in Sri Lanka on a live broadcast from a Tamil tea estate community in the hills. Also included in the program are the following segments:

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Yesterday the Examination Department released the Grade V scholarship examination results and they made it available on the Internet. As in the previous years many parents came to the CMC to get the results of their child sooner because it takes about two to three days for the result sheets to be delivered to schools via post. CMC charged Rs. 20 for a result with a Printout.

As this was happening I remembered an incident which happened last year. When I visited in the etuktuk to the rural village “lagumdeniya” to capture the moments of a village Sunday school prize giving festival I met a chatty little boy. He had done the grade five exam and was waiting for the results to come to the school. But the results have already been put on the Internet about one week back. I asked him whether he knew it or not. He said he knew but does not have access to the facilities so he had to wait until the results come to the school. All the students living in the urban areas get their results on the same day it is released but the story is different for the rural areas.

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It was a busy day for me. KCR had organized a small workshop for the local public librarians in the Gampola area. We were suppose to talk about the use of new technologies in the field of radio and how the same technologies can be use in the public library’s. In the same day etuktuk had planned to visit a estate community to do a computer literacy program. This was the first time etuktuk went to a estate community to do a computer literacy program. How ever I had to participate in the workshop held in Gelioya public library about 20Km from KCR. I wished if I could be in two places at the same time.

Sriyapali who is the CMC manager and one of the relief staff members of KCR had planned to go to visit the Kanapathiwatta estate nearby KCR( 5 minutes from KCR). Intension of this visit was to educate the estate children and young people in the estate about the computers technologies and encourage them to use the facilities provided in the CMC. Lac of participation for the estate community in the CMC activities is one of the main issues with the CMC and this was spoken i the CMC staff meetings by the EAR researcher.

One of the main reasons for lack of participation for the Tamil communities is the absence of a Tamil speaking trainer in the CMC. For the last 10 months I have witnessed very few Tamil youngsters coming to the center to be trained in computer skills but they never continue to come. The main reason for this is language. Absence of a Tamil speaking person makes it harder to be in the center for person from the Tamil community. This was reviled in one of my interveives in the same tea estate community. When I was interviewing a housewife from the same estate I asked her about the CMC. And her reply was, “my children use to come there to use computers when the foreign lady was there (in 1999-2002 when an Australian volunteer worked at the CMC), but after that they didn’t go there. Because nobody was there to teach them”. This clearly meant that they felt unwelcome at the CMC.

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Today I thought of visiting the Kanapathiwata tea estate line houses to test some of the Digital stories. Pavi had made a Digital story from our last visit to Riverside line houses. We thought of showing the Digital story to the kanapathiwatta people and see how the feedback is.

We left the station at around 3.00 p.m in the etuktuk. We did not carry the usual etuktuk equipment in it because we were not going on a usual recording trip. We go the lap top and pavi got the cassette recorder. From the station to mawathura town it takes about 5 minutes to get there. Its straight down hill. One of the line house colony is also situated in mawathura too which I did my research earlier.

This time we were visiting the upper parts of the Kanapathiwatta estate. From Mawathura we had to take the galath road , a narrow road up hill. After travelling 10 minutes up hill I the main road we took the dusty narrow road which lead to the kanapathiwata tea estate line house community. The road condition was very bad. After few minutes bumpy ride I the tuktuk we could see the houses. There were about 20 line houses situated from the top of the hill to bottom. These line houses were different from the riverside line houses. The river side line houses had 4 houses in a single line and the space for each house was very limited. But here only two houses are there in a single line. And the houses seem to have more space. The houses looked very neat and clean from the outside. Electric cable can be seen going I to the houses which meant that they got electricity too. Water taps were seen in some of the houses. Some houses had nice small gardens too.

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It was a partly cloudy day and we were afraid that rain would interfere with our journey. We had planned several visits to nearby locations in the etuktuk. Our first destination was to a daycare center located in a nearby tea estate. Estate people leave their children in this day care centre when they go to work during the day. The center is located about 1 kilometer towards ‘Galatha’ area from Mavathura town, approximately 2 kilometers from the Kothmale CMC. The terrain is a hilly area covered with tea plantations.

We got there at around 10.30am and the estate superintendent and the matrons welcomed us warmly. The etuktuk was accompanied by a van and we were able to take two station announcers, researcher, computer trainer, and a local photographer with us. Normally the tuktuk alone could house only three persons including the driver. But occasionally it can be expanded to 4 people with some discomfort.

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We started our journey at about 1.00p.m. Destination was a temple in Kurunduwatta. Kurunduwatta is about 15 km from Gampola and it’s a suburban area situated in the Dolosbage Mountains. Fore of us traveled in the etuktuk, Asanka the driver, Anil the program producer, Prasanna volunteer, and me. The road was hilly and we had to drive slowly. It took about 45 minutes to get to the temple.

It was their annual meeting of the village welfare society. The villagers had organized a small cultural show in the temple after the meeting. When we got there the meeting was about to start. Therefore we had to stay two more hours until the meeting end. We decided to leave the temple for the time being and come back in two hours.

Kurunduwatta area is a partly remote place. Public transportation is comparatively less. The terrain is covered with tea plantation at some areas. Paddy is a common site. Most people in the area travel to the nearby city ‘Gampola’ to work. Others do farming, day to day labor etc. Kurunduwatta town is a developing small town. Most basic facilities of the town are still under construction.

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When I reached Kothmale on 10 May, the eTukTuk was already in its lair — a converted kitchen in the Kothmale CR building — having been driven the 150 odd kilometers from Colombo to Kothmale by a visibly tired Ben and his crew. But there was work to be done — a field broadcast was scheduled that evening, the eTukTuk’s first community OB (Outside Broadcast) event in Kothmale, at the village of Weliganga.

Weliganga (‘river-flats’) clings to a hillside a few kilometers downhill from KCR. As the tuktuk rolls into a
small clearing with a dilapidated shed at its far end, alight monsoon rain begins to fall. Within minutes the crew has fired up the transmitter and laptop, and cables snake across the wet grass.

The tuktuk’s transmitter is a vintage 50 watt FM exciter, a clunky beast that goes back to the early days of KCR and is too big fit anywhere except on the rooftop rack. (This is an obvious worry for the Kothmale station — you don’t carry sensitive broadcast equipment on an exposed rack in the monsoon — and they are raising the funds to buy a sleeker model that will fit inside the tuktuk). I watch bemused as an 18 foot antenna mast is swiftly put together from three lengths of galvanized iron pipe clamped end-to-end.

Sunil Shanta, KCR’s relief announcer launches into a practiced spiel that’s fed into the twin speakers mounted on the tuktuk’s roof. Soon, the clearing and the shed fill with an expectant crowd — mostly women and children — some carrying plastic chairs and mats.

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